Issue with HTML entities

[amax]

Hi All, Im pulling my hair out here. All my pages are set to UTF-8 with header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");

On page A I have a form element <input type="hidden" name="body" value="'.htmlentities($body).'" /> that I get on Page B with :

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
$body = $_POST['body'];
echo html_entity_decode($body, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

No matter what I do however, I get the following string returned:
â&#65533;¬ £ - is the body
Its as if the decoding is being totally ignored. I have also tried iconv with every possible charset but same issue. No matter what I do the euro and pound symbols remain as htmlentities from the post. Has anyone any ideas or can see where Im going wrong here with my code

[bradgrafelman]

One idea I have is... stop printing data in a hidden form element that you simply have submitted back to you again unmodified(?). Why not just keep the data server-side and not have to deal with putting it in the HTML document in the first place?

[johanafm]

Also, the value you get back as $_POST['body'] is what you had in $body to begin with. Change the hidden input to a text input and you'll see what's there after being processed by the client... You can use print_r() on the post array to see what it contains as it gets to the server.

And just because you say tell the browser that the data is utf-8 doesn't actually mean it has to be.
Where does your data come from: a file saved in cp-1252, a latin-1 DB column...?